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“Betrayal - that pain that feels like it’ll eat you from the inside out - can either break you, or forge you into something greater.” – Silco (Arcane)

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Caution: potential spoilers for Arcane below!

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This may come as a surprise, but I actually didn’t intend to write any poetry about Arcane after I finished watching it a few months ago. It felt clumsy and inadequate to write words about a show that can say so much so well with as few of them as possible. But there were some things that I felt and saw that really touched me, some on a very personal level, and I wanted to try. 

Silco’s quote about betrayal specifically really struck a cord, both in its accuracy, and how it reminded me of my previous work on the topic. Since Silco is my favorite character from the show (much more on him another time) I really wanted to revisit the topic through his lens - rising above your pain.

Arcane uses the act and meaning of baptism for this, which I find both interesting and effective. Both Silco’s brush with drowning (his own “baptism”) and his more traditional baptism of Jinx are used to symbolize a decision and desire to change – a death/leaving behind of the old, and a cleansing/rebirth of the new. For these characters, this change becomes an act of turning  pain into strength: Silco claims to have let “a weak man die,” when he fought for his life – the “weak man” being, in his eyes, any vestige of emotion or morality that would inhibit his conviction to do whatever it takes to free his people. He then attempts to help Jinx “let Powder die” –in other words, bury her past mistakes, the child she once was, and embrace the strong young woman she is and chooses to be in the present.

Both of these decisions have their moral ambiguity in these instances, as does everything in Arcane, but the overall message and symbolic meaning here - breaking free from our pain and our pasts and not letting them control what we do or who we want to be - is a positive and truthful one.


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